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<p>Despite the growing body of research on sustainability transitions and sustainability transformations, conceptual overlaps and distinctions remain contested. This study investigates how leading scholars in these fields understand agency, governance, and resilience in the context of societal change. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with highly cited transition and transformation researchers, we gather conceptual insights and make tacit knowledge and personal scholarly perspectives visible. The findings show that&#xa0;agency&#xa0;centers on actor roles and collaborations,&#xa0;operates through a&#xa0;dynamic interplay between individual initiative, collective mobilization, and structural conditions. Governance&#xa0;ranges from state-led top-down to participatory bottom-up approaches, at times combining both.&#xa0;Resilience&#xa0;highlights systems thinking and crises as potential catalysts. Beyond and within these themes, scholars reflect on the blurred boundaries between sustainability transitions and sustainability transformations, and on tensions between process-oriented inclusivity and outcome-oriented directionality, as well as their own roles of researchers in transitions and transformations. These complexity-informed perspectives can advance sustainability research and practice, for example in noting towards adaptive and context-sensitive operationalization of concepts. By foregrounding the voices of scholars whose work has shaped the discourses, the study shows that transitions and transformations should not be treated as linear pathways toward predefined outcomes, but as processes unfolding under conditions of uncertainty, where governance must balance directionality with openness.</p>

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Between transition and transformation: understanding sustainability change through governance, agency, and resilience—a qualitative exploration of complexity in sustainability change discourses

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月11日

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  • Esther Trilken,
  • Lea Gathen,
  • Anna Salomaa,
  • Johanna Glinski

摘要

Despite the growing body of research on sustainability transitions and sustainability transformations, conceptual overlaps and distinctions remain contested. This study investigates how leading scholars in these fields understand agency, governance, and resilience in the context of societal change. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with highly cited transition and transformation researchers, we gather conceptual insights and make tacit knowledge and personal scholarly perspectives visible. The findings show that agency centers on actor roles and collaborations, operates through a dynamic interplay between individual initiative, collective mobilization, and structural conditions. Governance ranges from state-led top-down to participatory bottom-up approaches, at times combining both. Resilience highlights systems thinking and crises as potential catalysts. Beyond and within these themes, scholars reflect on the blurred boundaries between sustainability transitions and sustainability transformations, and on tensions between process-oriented inclusivity and outcome-oriented directionality, as well as their own roles of researchers in transitions and transformations. These complexity-informed perspectives can advance sustainability research and practice, for example in noting towards adaptive and context-sensitive operationalization of concepts. By foregrounding the voices of scholars whose work has shaped the discourses, the study shows that transitions and transformations should not be treated as linear pathways toward predefined outcomes, but as processes unfolding under conditions of uncertainty, where governance must balance directionality with openness.